Yet another Hacker News

Google no longer provides direct URLs in search results

117 points 1e1a 1 hour ago 64 comments

1e1a 1 hour ago | parent

Direct URLs in Google search results have been replaced with redirect URLs in the form of www.google.com/goto?url=<opaque base64 string>.

The base64 data appears to consist of a very basic protobuf structure, containing a long string of bytes in field 2 which presumably identify the URL.

Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.

darknavi 40 minutes ago | parent

> Sometimes, these redirect URLs take a perceivable amount of time to load, which is very irritating.

Great. On top of my on-going battle with Windows + Firefox + DNS/TLS resolution sometimes stalling for seconds at a time, another few second server-side stall is introduced.

I swear that every day modern computing scenarios get slower and slower instead of snappier and snappier.

JohnFen 1 hour ago | parent

If I hadn't already ditched Google long ago, this would be more than enough to chase me away.

scottyah 55 minutes ago | parent

Why? I don't really see why this is bad, other than if your company blocks url shorteners/redirects. What are you losing?

nextaccountic 51 minutes ago | parent

I use a Firefox extension to rewrite those Google redirects into plain links, to remove Google tracking of which links I click. The extension is broken now

JohnFen 48 minutes ago | parent

Because I wouldn't want Google to know what links I click on. When I used to use Google, and they added such redirects that included the destination URL as a parameter, I'd edit the link to make it just that URL before resolving it. This new scheme would make that impossible.

Fabricio20 47 minutes ago | parent

Blocking URL shorteners and google-ad links yes! Personally for me it's also the fact that this is effectively an unresolvable URL shortener, store that link somewhere and it will most likely be dead. Can't copy link anymore and paste it on a notepad or chat app to check it out later as there isn't a guarantee it will load at all (ie: the problem with url shorteners).

tarkin2 45 minutes ago | parent

They are forcing my further and further towards kagi. I do hope the fawning on here is at least partly justified.

JohnFen 40 minutes ago | parent

Kagi is what I settled on a couple of years ago. I do think sometimes the fawning is over the top, but it is a solid search engine and tended to give me a bit better results than Google out of the box. The real win, though, is that you can give various sites a weight, so the search results will prefer or avoid sites according to your desires. Once I had that going, my search results tended to be much better than Google.

tarkin2 25 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, that's the thing for me: filtering out the SEO crap that Google happily serves up.

Google's actual search results are a waste of time visiting, both for the mindless CEO content and the ad-laden, analytics-happy, javascript-heavy websites.

So I tend to use the AI overview. But plugging myself into the all-seeing corporate oracle, that grew on all the web's content, and now seeks to supplant it seems unseemly.

It's just sad that kagi will likely only be a fringe thing, and google will continue to promote these foul, foul, mindless websites and then supplant them with its AI.

liquid_thyme 1 hour ago | parent

I've been using the 'ClearURLs' FF addon for quite a while now, and it gives you the URLs back in the results.

https://docs.clearurls.xyz/

joeblubaugh 1 hour ago | parent

That wouldn’t work at all with this url format - the url can only be resolved by requesting the goto link.

I recommend reading more than the headline

II2II 14 minutes ago | parent

I decided to verify the article's claims, forgetting that I had ClearURLs installed, and ClearURLs does not handle this new format.

The article also suggests that it cannot be decoded.

nullbio 1 hour ago | parent

The enshittification continues.

Nothing good ever comes from businesses desperately trying to protect their moats rather than making their products better so they don't need to.

stackghost 56 minutes ago | parent

Thank Prabhakar Raghavan for that. After destroying Yahoo’s search product he failed up and did the same at Google.

In reward for making Google Search materially worse in every way except ad revenue, he failed up again and was promoted to a cushy do-nothing role.

Everything wrong with the tech industry, embodied in a single person.

ulfw 50 minutes ago | parent

Well one has to look a level up and ask who the people are who hire such people and why

sumedh 13 minutes ago | parent

If Google's ad revenue is going up he is keeping the shareholders happy.

donmcronald 56 minutes ago | parent

I use ChatGPT for almost all my searches now. I’m not joking.

nextaccountic 52 minutes ago | parent

I wish one of those free AIs made a search product already. I don't want my search results to be interspersed with text

I guess that the web chat can have a search skill to remove the prose and give only links, plus maybe an excerpt of each result

peri-cl 42 minutes ago | parent

What's a search skill? Is that any different from just using that as a system prompt, i.e. for a Custom Assistant in Kagi?

InsideOutSanta 32 minutes ago | parent

Z.ai has a search MCP server, it should be trivial to use that to build a basic search UI on top.

entropie 52 minutes ago | parent

Yeah, its way faster.

Its not because chatgpt is so superior. Its just because google search is dogshit.

They work on killing the web as we knew it and I fear its kinda working.

taurath 47 minutes ago | parent

Can’t sell Gemini if they were to make Search good.

Streaming services already adding in ads to “ad-free” tiers they’ve now named “premium”.

Quality of life on the internet has gotten shitty while Reality Classic stays mostly the same, though more expensive.

Marsymars 11 minutes ago | parent

Whenever I've tried this, it seems okay if you need an answer to a question, but plain bad if I'm looking for a specific page.

e.g. I'm just now looking for the menu for a local restaurant. "restaurantname menu" in Kagi (Google would presumably be similar) returns a link to the menu as the first result in about a second. Or "restaurantname menu !" goes directly to the menu in about a second.

Meanwhile, searching "restaurantname menu" in chatgpt takes about 5 seconds to return an embedded map from mapbox showing the location of the restaurant. If I click the restaurant pin on the map, there's no menu link, the 667 reviews have no link or way to view, and the restaurant description literally says "I don't have enough information to identify which local business <restaurantname> refers to."

Below the map there's some text: "If you mean <restaurantname> in <place>, here’s the current menu. <restaurantname>". The <restaurantname> link just opens the same card as clicking the pin on the map.

After that there's a bullet point list of the menu that ommits a ton of detail and options.

After that there's finally a link... that I can click to open up a popup at the bottom of the page with an actual link to the menu.

This was literally the first thing that popped into my head, I didn't have to put any effort into finding a query where chatgpt falls on its face.

demibabs 55 minutes ago | parent

Can someone explain why this matters? Not being flippant I just don’t understand why this would be important.

Cider9986 54 minutes ago | parent

They were already tracking everything you click but for example if you want to send a link to someone you can't copy the link from the Google result and send it to them, you'd either send them the Google tracking link or go to the website yourself.

rootsudo 51 minutes ago | parent

Tracking. Tied to use account, length of stay, how many reclixks, etc for marketing by/ads and surveillance.

demibabs 43 minutes ago | parent

But what’s stopping Google from doing this already?

1e1a 27 minutes ago | parent

JavaScript being disabled - Google was already sending analytics pings when search result links were clicked on, using JS.

Cider9986 18 minutes ago | parent

It doesn't work without JS though.

0gs 50 minutes ago | parent

it sounds like it primarily matters if you are a customer of this company, one that is building a search index off of urls scrapably hardcoded (or at least so as to be easily unencodable in non-realtime, it sounds like?) inside google search result redirects. in theory, there could be noticeable consumer user impact, but ... it would have to be a pretty large theory

csomar 47 minutes ago | parent

The security implications of this are very severe when you consider the amount of people who google government websites, banking, crypto and others. And google will happily serve you a phishing website either in ads or results.

layman51 47 minutes ago | parent

Well just as a regular user, I think it is pretty annoying because if I look up anything on Google while in Incognito Mode and hover over a search result, I can see that maybe the top result is maybe Wikipedia, or Instagram, or some other less-known website depending on what I'm searching for. Now, that's all very obfuscated because I don't actually know where I'm going to land for sure.

InsideOutSanta 33 minutes ago | parent

It's primarily relevant because it makes scraping search results much more expensive, solidifying Google's effective monopoly on Internet search.

Google has previously tried to prevent scraping of search results using legal means, but courts correctly think that scraping of Google's search results should be legal, just as Google's scraping of the whole Internet is legal. This is Google's reaction to that.

Cider9986 55 minutes ago | parent

Brave search (free) or Kagi (paid) are able to replace Google and not feel like I'm missing out.

Brave has its own independent index which is cool.

pbhjpbhj 48 minutes ago | parent

ISPs can presumably correlate the Google query string with the request following the response to the goto and so make a search index? I guess they would charge too much.

Do any large ISPs use visit data to feed into a search index?

TZubiri 40 minutes ago | parent

ISPs do not see query strings since Google uses HTTPS. ISPs can only see the domain and IP address you are connecting to.

fps-hero 47 minutes ago | parent

It hasn’t provided direct URLs for decades? Not exactly new behaviour.

I’ve got something that will blow your mind. Google now has tracking analytics, for get this, your business’s phone number. Some “Adsense partner” convinced our web admin to install a little script which changes your phone number on your website so they track phone call enquires back to search engine leads / advertising spend.

Yeah no thanks, that was creepy as hell and had it rolled back ASAP. You’ve got to realise the power these tech companies hold over your business. Don’t show up in the search results, someone lists your business as closed in maps, a tracking phone number goes dead so they can’t call you, you might as well have shut up shop and ceased to exist.

414techie 45 minutes ago | parent

Would it be different to you if a third company (not Google) provided that same phone number tracking service?

philipov 42 minutes ago | parent

Would that company then sell that data back to Google? The consolidation of control of information under a single actor is certainly a factor, but it's not that simple, and it's not the only factor. You shouldn't be so eager to outsource as much of your business intelligence as possible.

thrirhrhdbejejs 42 minutes ago | parent

This is nothing - Google has had things like the ability to track in-store conversions based on Android/Gmaps tracking for years.

Some of the things TV companies do will shock you too.

Avicebron 47 minutes ago | parent

It's sad that instead of searching things other people put up, we're basically asking sam or dario oracle to tell us the truth. The people should be furious. But we've internalized this idea that they are somehow better.

water-drummer 45 minutes ago | parent

Gemini does something similar

ur-whale 44 minutes ago | parent

Google Search is dying, and it is showing all the standard symptoms.

rmunn 43 minutes ago | parent

I've been using DuckDuckGo for years now, ever since it became noticeable that two different people searching for the same search term would get two different results back from Google. Meaning they were no longer completely reliable: they might show one person a result that they hide from the other person by burying it on page 3 where few people ever look.

DDG's search results have been poorer recently than they used to — I often see completely unrelated results (to the point of my saying "Why in the world did that come back as a search result??!?") starting from page 2. And yet, I still use them, simply because they aren't Google.

golly_ned 42 minutes ago | parent

Personalized search results are not ipso facto unreliable.

rmunn 36 minutes ago | parent

It means they're capable of burying news stories that would contradict your worldview and pushing news stories that support your pre-existing biases, leading to more engagement from you (a win from their point of view) but also burying you in an echo chamber. And unless you were in the habit of doing the occasional search in Incognito Mode, you wouldn't know. (And even then, they probably would be able to put together enough clues to figure out your identity even without your Google login cookie).

Yes, the fact that they could do it does not prove that they were doing it, not right away. I ditched them as soon as I found out that they could do it, because I was absolutely certain that eventually, they would end up doing it. And I wanted neutral search results, not biased ones, even ones biased towards my own point of view.

rileymat2 21 minutes ago | parent

I subscribe to The New York Times, if I am searching for a news event, I’d appreciate a site that’s not paywalled and I trust be the first result if it is reasonable.

Brian_K_White 9 minutes ago | parent

Anything that isn't repeatable is by definition unreliable.

_jackdk_ 38 minutes ago | parent

Speaking of page 3, Google's been asking me to sign in if I try to go beyond page 2 of search results. What a wonderful modern WWW we live in.

pibaker 6 minutes ago | parent

I don't know how global consistency is actually useful, but I can easily think of ways it is less convenient.

For example, DST starts and ends on different dates in the UK and the US. Which dates should google return when someone from either country searches for just "DST end date?" Someone lives in Orange County and searches for "Orange County Sheriffs," which one of the eight Orange Counties should google return?

These are both examples where a localized — not even customized, just localized based on IP addresses — search results will easily help reduce headaches.

copemaxxxing 36 minutes ago | parent

I've been using Brave search for a year now, because there is no way to turn off Google AI search.

I don't miss Google at all.

Goodbye you shit company.

Lvl999Noob 35 minutes ago | parent

I... Don't see it? It's the result page right? I just search some random string on Google and the results are all direct URLs. Do they get resolved via javascript after page load and replaced automatically? Or am I looking at something else?

1e1a 34 minutes ago | parent

It looks like it isn't yet rolled out to some users, try with a different browser session.

firefoxd 18 minutes ago | parent

At this point, we can all just drop SEO [0]. We are writing content for a robot that hides the source of information.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49665572

Animats 17 minutes ago | parent

Bing has done that for years. Hated it.

faangguyindia 12 minutes ago | parent

Most people i see using ChatGPT for any search related work in everyday life.

Maybe Google is observing this?

MiroslavPokorny 5 minutes ago | parent

No longer ?

Google has been encoding the target url for years.